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Acronis True Image Home 2010: Backup and Recovery (PC)

List Price: £19.99
Our Price: £17.99
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours

Average Customer Rating:

Binding: CD-ROM
Brand: Acronis Inc.
EAN: 4260019572257
Format: CD-ROM
Label: Acronis Inc.
Manufacturer: Acronis Inc.
Number Of Discs: 1
Platform: Windows Vista
Publisher: Acronis Inc.
Release Date: 2009-10-08
Studio: Acronis Inc.

Related Items
Acronis Disk Director 11 Home Edition (PC) Acronis True Image Home 2010 Netbook Edition Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 (PC CD) Partition Commander 11 (PC CD) Nero 9 Reloaded

Spotlight customer reviews:

Customer Rating:

Summary: Useless so far...
Comment: Well I've just started to use this software and the best I can say is that it hasn't crashed or otherwise damaged my computer like a lot of the 1-star reviews state. That's the main reason I didn't give it 1 star.

For the record, I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with lots of "background" software running including Kaspersky Internet Security 2010, Nokia PC Suite and Windows Live Mesh (great product! Pity they're discontinuing it).

As things stand today, the product is useless for one reason: I am unable to restore from the backups that Acronis True Image Home 2010 produces. Whenever I try to copy and paste a file from the backup image I get the message "Access is denied".

There's no point in a backup solution backing up perfectly if it's impossible to restore from the backup. I have spent a bit of time looking for a way to create "regular" Windows folders instead of the Acronis proprietary ".tib" backup format and it doesn't seem to be an option.

I have three more issues with the software but they're irrelevant if I'm not able to restore my backups. Briefly they are:
- Windows Explorer crashes when navigating through an Acronis TIH 2010 backup file about 50% of the time
- Editing an existing backup definition causes Acronis TIH 2010 to hang, requiring me to kill it and restart it.
- One backup job simply not running (error "The operation failed") and producing no error or warning messages in the log file.

I've logged a support case with Acronis today through their web site but from other reviews, it seems that I shouldn't hold my breath about getting a response.

I'll update this review if I can when/if I hear back from Acronis. I feel foolish for not reading the reviews on Amazon and trying the software before buying it. I didn't even realise that was an option.

2 suggestions for anyone considering buying this software:

1. Download and try the trial before you buy
2. Try restoring your backed-up files before you think everything is working

Customer Rating:

Summary: Acronis the great!
Comment: Excellent product, easy to use and invaluable if your hard disk crashes or you want to upgrade your current hard disk.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Very disappointed
Comment: I bought this on the strength of the previous reviews for my new computer, following the difficulty in recovering from a previous hard drive failure. I had previously taken the precaution manually copying everything that would copy onto an external harddrive, and there was no problem in manually recovering my personal data from that to the new computer. What was much harder was restoring the hidden settings, like the appearance of the desktop, my email address book, word preferences, etc.

I was under the impression that this backup and recovery software would simply automatically create backups and provide a means of full recovery of all data.
Simple it is not. Despite buying the retail boxed version, which installed without error, I still had to find and download the 197 page manual from the Acronis web page, and I still don't understand what I have to do to make this software work. It certainly is not intuitive, and clicking on the two backup options offered result in computer-nerd speak. All I want is a simple dialogue that explains what it is about to do, what the options mean and then gets on with it. This product fails on all of those points.
I will try it once more, if that fails, it will be uninstalled and confined to the bin.
Very disappointed, it is too specialised for the average user who simply uses a PC as a tool, not a way of life.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Some initial problems
Comment: After reading some not very complimentary reviews I was rather dubious about purchasing this software.

Having installed and registered it I can see why there were some unhappy customers. As reported as soon as you start to install Acronis True Image Home 2010 you are asked if you want to download the latest version(114MB). Having done this you then have to produce a Bootable Media CD which would not run due to "Library Errors". This was cured by logging on to the Acronis website and downloading the Bootable Media ISO file so that you could create another Bootable Media CD which worked.

Once you overcome these problems backups are easy to produce and recovery from them is straight forward.

After about a fortnight FAIL indications, for scheduled tasks, were presented on a daily basis. This was a surprise as I had not scheduled any tasks. Submitting the error event code to the Acronis Knowledge Database was extremely unhelpful. Using Add/Delete Programmes to remove Acronis and downloading the latest version cured this problem at the second attempt (the first download had a missing file).

Seems to be working fine now but I would be much happier if it had worked correctly from day 1.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Great Backup
Comment: I have ben using this product for my PC for just under a year, with great success. I bought a second licence for my laptop which is kept in our mobile home in Spain. It is so easy to use that even although I am far from a computer nerd, I can use it eassily to back up my entire system, although you can choose to back up files only if you wish.I simply carry my backup hard disc to and from the UK - simplicity itself.